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Kitty's Kitchen
Phenigma
Review by Raymond Greenoaken for Be Glad magazine
I'm reviewing these two albums together because, in my mind at least, they
seem to belong with each other. They both feature what you might call
Celto-Canadian bands (based in Canada but with a taproot in Scots and Irish
traditions); they're both available from the same source; and they both arrived at Be Glad Towers at the
same time, so I've been listening to them in tandem, and indeed they make
excellent companion pieces. If the Merry Band were ever dear to your heart,
the chances are you'll find plenty to please you here.
Kitty's Kitchen are a four-piece featuring uillean pipes, whistle, harp,
guitar, bouzouki and the voice of Kate Crossan. It's Kate's singing that
inevitably tugs most at your attention. She has a airy, supple and winsome
voice-pure Irish colleen-married to a formidable technique and
heart-stopping expressiveness. There's not a song here, Anglophone or
Gaelic, that she doesn't take and inhabit completely. She's aided by
consistently sympathetic arrangements essayed by Jack McRae, Tadgh ó Muiris
and Debbie Quigley. The three of them also crank out a welcome measure of
jigs and reels, cleanly, uncluttered and sprightly as a ditchful of
crickets. Kitty's Kitchen pull off the difficult trick of making
traditional music sound totally contemporary without surrendering it to
modish gimmickry or white-knuckle tempos. Devotees of the uillean pipes,
the howling, keening, chuckling, multi-voiced maestro of the bagpipe clan,
will find plenty to please them in Debbie Quigley's playing-though likely
not enough: this woman deserves a CD of her own at the first opportunity.
Phenigma's approach presents a contrast to the foregoing, but an agreeable
one nonetheless. A fair dose of multi-tracking, dramatic keyboards, layered
vocal harmonies, abrupt changes of rhythm and tempo: here we're in the
familiar territory of post-Planxty Celtic ensemble music. Nothing wrong
with that, of course, so long as it's as well done as it is here.
Occasionally you might prefer less to be going on. The lead instruments
don't always knit together as tightly as they might, and the keyboards can
dominate proceedings in the way that keyboards do. But when the approach
works, as it does most of the time, it works a treat.
The multi-tracked whistles and flutes on the opening tune set, Packie's
Jigs, make a glorious racket. There are shrewd and imaginative touches
throughout, like the thundering Cyclopean drumbeat on Bi Falbh o'n Uinneag,
or the slowed-down an dro (a normally vigorous Breton circle dance) that
precedes Hush Hush. And you may well note passages here and there in which
the flute-fiddle-strings combination reminds you of the Merry Band in their
pomp.
The band pull in Scottish and Quebecois stuff as well as Irish, acquitting
themselves admirably on each. In Sinč McKenna they have a singer who, if
not in the Crossan class, seems nicely at ease with her material. Stephen
Jones' fiddling, with its rugged tone and staccato phrasing, suggests a
close study of the Donegal style. And both he and flautist Jean Duval
contribute a number of original tunes, all to an exemplary standard.
Two albums, then, that hint at the rude health of the Celto-Canadian
traditional scene. Buy 'em both and please our advertisers!-but if your
overdraft limits you to only one, Kate Crossan's voice might just tip the
scales.
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